The one identity we’re not encouraged to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others, our identity as citizens of a very particular kind of society, built on the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression, and the universal franchise.……………………………..

In the Western myth, many have found exactly what they were looking for. Significantly, the images and the simple story of the western legend first caught on in the early nineteenth century, those years when the young Republic, like a proud and gawky adolescent was trying to decide who and what it was. This myth has been around ever since, simply because it has always done its job.
The legend is rooted in a story with which just about anyone can identify. It tells what happened when ordinary people moved into an extraordinary land. Often enough they overcame the challenges that they met there, but the real point of the story is not what happened to the land, but what happened to the people. They were changed, the legend insists—transformed, reborn. And they were better for it. The ordeal in the wilderness created the American, we believe, free-thinking, open, tough, optimistic, self-reliant—the litany goes on and on. The western hero has embodied these virtues and this message. He is us, only a little bigger, tougher, braver. From James Fenimore Cooper to John Wayne, whenever someone has told us this story and has done it well, we have clapped and made him rich.

The framework that the Founders devised to unite a baker’s dozen of small homogeneous colonies on the Atlantic coast proved strong enough to expand across a continent and halfway round the globe to Hawaii. That’s why the British have successfully exported Westminster constitutions to Belize, Papua New Guinea, and India, the world’s largest democracy, mainly Hindu but with a minority population of 150 million Muslims (that’s some minority) who to their credit have no interest in the fetid swamp of militant Islamism in which so many of their co-religionists elsewhere are festering. Of the world’s fifty most free nations, half were once ruled by Britain. That’s the sort of thing most countries would boast about, not teach in schools as a shameful legacy of oppression.……………………………………………………………………………………Mark Steyn: Ibid

Our county was not predestined to prosper, it did so through choices made at its Founding and renewed every generation since: the choices of freedom over rule, property over collectivization, the liberty of the individual human spirit over the dictates of the enlightened few. We should be thankful for the wisdom of our ancestors in creating this heritage, and mindful of our stewardship as we are called to carry forward this idea called America.…………………………